Mac OS X Lion will be available on USB thumb drive for $69 in August - Page 2

Hey, just a damn minute. I remember when OS X updates were $129.00 so keep your shirts on, $69 is cheap.

Absolutely correct. $29 download is cheap. $69 thumb drive is equally cheap. Apple could have charged $69 for a download and $129 for a thumb drive and sold just as many copies. Lion is better than Windows 7 Professional and a fraction of the cost. This is one time that Apple is actually doing its customers a favor.

So if you buy a new Mac with Lion today does it come witha thumb drive, a disc or nothing at all?

That's a good question, what would one do to replace a bad hard drive? The Air included a thumb drive that I recall.

Granted, people *should* have backups, but often I find that's not the case. My sister bought a drive to store backups, but turns out she never even hooked it up to the computer, never mind making a drive copy. I don't know if she thought that it was supposed to magically copy or what.

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Originally Posted by Wovel

Nothing about a torrent will speed up your download. Presumably lion is being downloaded via whatever CDN apple is using these days, so distance from Californi is irrelevant.

A torrent can speed it up if your direct download speed is slower than the capacity of your connection. But it is copyright infringement if you didn't pay for the license.

That's a good question, what would one do to replace a bad hard drive? The Air included a thumb drive that I recall.

The page for the MBA no longer states that it comes with an 8GB USB flash drive with the installer.

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In the box:

MacBook Air

45W MagSafe Power Adapter, AC wall plug, and power cord

Printed and electronic documentation

It goes on to state…

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Lion Recovery:

OS X Lion includes a built-in set of tools for repairing your Mac in the Recovery HD, a new feature that lets you repair disks or reinstall OS X Lion without a physical disc.

While disc typically refers to an optical disc I'd say that is enough evidence to show that any drive replacement would require shipping to Apple, bringing into an Apple Store, or installing from the USB drive they will sell or the one you can make from App Store download to reinstall Lion.

However, note the MBA don't come with HDDs but SSD cards which are unlikely to fail or be replaced by the consumers.

PS: We'll see if Apple's policy changes when their prosumer machines lose the ODD.

Dick Applebaum on whether the iPad is a personal computer: "BTW, I am posting this from my iPad pc while sitting on the throne... personal enough for you?"

"AppleInsider was first to report in May that Apple planned to release Lion through the Mac App Store, but also that Apple would offer a physical copy of the operating system for those who would prefer to have one. And in June, an exclusive report suggested lower pricing for Lion could be tied to purchasing through the Mac App Store."

If AI had info in May that there would be a physical copy of the Lion software, why did it repeat many many times "Lion will only be available by download from the App Store".

If you instead you had repeated what you claimed you knew, you could have avoided a lot of upset readers. It appears to me that you choose for the sensational: AI looking a lot like a tabloid.

So please stay consistent in your reporting with what you earlier reported or at least include a note when there are conflicts.

And a lot of those cheap flash drives are, to be polite, crap. I've seen a number of cheap (PNY, among others) thumb drives fail with little use.

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so I assume Apple could buy a container of them for like a quarter or something...

That's right. You assume...

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those who cant afford broadband will be most impacted by this, as well as those folks in areas that are under served...this is a tax on those who live in bad broadband areas, shame on those users for not moving to a part of the country with a faster pipe to get the new toys.

This solves the problem of upgrading to Lion for those not currently running Snow Leopard quite nicely: Snow Leopard install disks ($29), Lion installer ($29), thumb drive ($9). $2 for shipping, and there you go.

Or you could look at from Apple's PoV. Just assume the cost of the Flash drive, loading packaging and shipping is $5. That means the cost of of the Lion is $64, which means they are charging $35 for the inconvenience of having to spend money on flash drives, loading, packing and shipping in the first place.

You forget the Snow Leopard installation, which you'd have had to have installed before you could use the Mac App Store.

I'd still rather have a thumb drive as a recovery but if you keep a Time Machine or cloned backup and have internet recovery, I'd say that's enough recovery options and probably more convenient than finding the disc.

Or you could look at from Apple's PoV. Just assume the cost of the Flash drive, loading packaging and shipping is $5. That means the cost of of the Lion is $64, which means they are charging $35 for the inconvenience of having to spend money on flash drives, loading, packing and shipping in the first place.

So the consumer should have to pay for the "inconvenience" of a business offering a product for sale? Wow how much Kool-Aid have you drunk?

It takes up 3.81GB on the 8GB (7.62GB available) SD card I just used to do clean install on a MBA.

No telling why various people are getting different sizes for the installer.

I'm sure he means that his 4 million byte Flash drive is slightly too small after being formatted to the less than 4GB DMG. He may have that hidden "U2" partition that comes on Sandisk drives or some other brands hidden volume taking up too much space.

My 4GB USB flash drive has 3.86 GB available after being formatted with the GUID Partition Table.

Dick Applebaum on whether the iPad is a personal computer: "BTW, I am posting this from my iPad pc while sitting on the throne... personal enough for you?"

This policy is a classic illustration of a corporate-executive-level screw up.

No it's not. The market is shifting and your not. The world won't end, Mac OSX 10.7 will be a success, and the pessimists will find something new to whine about.

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It's been going for about 45 minutes on my fairly fast cable broadband connection, and I don't have any idea how much longer it will take.

Click on the Purchased tab in the App store and you will see your download and estimated time.

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Apple's end is getting hammered hard.

Apple isn't, their CDN partners (mainly Akamai) are.

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At about 6:30 am, it was peaking at about 1.2 MBs. Now it's limping along at about 200 KBs, one sixth the earlier speed.

Maybe your cable company is throttling you? I just downloaded Xcode a half an hour ago and it took about the same time as Lion did this morning - 45 minutes. Apple's content distribution network seems to be handling things just fine at least from my perspective.

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And once that's done, I'll have to do the same thing for my iMac.

Only if you are too stupid to make a copy of the Mac OS X Lion installer in the applications folder before installing (as has been outlined in NUMEROUS articles on every Mac site today!). Just make a copy of it before installing it and you can copy it to as many Mac's as you need. My MacBook Pro I'm typing on right now was upgraded to Lion from the installer that I downloaded on my Mac Pro early this morning (that took less than 45 minutes at 10:00 AM EST on a standard Comcast home account).

Oh, and move the installer out of the Applications folder before running and it won't delete itself when done.

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Dumb. Really, really dumb.

Complaining about self-induced problems are dumb. There is nothing wrong with the way Apple is distributing Lion - other than getting used to the differences. Overall I'm much more happy with this. Not ever having to worry about loosing an install DVD is something I'm really looking forward to - esp. since I spent a few panicked hours looking for my SL DVD after a recent hard drive crash. Never again!

Hey, just a damn minute. I remember when OS X updates were $129.00 so keep your shirts on, $69 is cheap.

No kidding. simply being able to resize windows from any size (FINALLY!) was worth every penny.

The fact that iTunes and Safari are now fully 64 bit and haven't slowed down yet is also well worth it. And I haven't even started playing with everything else yet! I could stop right now and be completely satisfied!

I think it's clear that like the charge for matte screens, it's a way to discourage people. If it was inexpensive, a lot of people would likely opt for the USB drive.

Oh for crying out loud - it's a way to cover costs for a minor amount of users.

If your in the minority, you should expect to pay more - costs are higher for lower volume purchases, especially for low volume purchases that have the overhead of physical goods that have all the related logical requirements.

I'd still rather have a thumb drive as a recovery but if you keep a Time Machine or cloned backup and have internet recovery, I'd say that's enough recovery options and probably more convenient than finding the disc.

Yup - having just went through finding my Snow Leopard disk to recover from a dead drive, I welcome being able to have the option to download or use the Internet instead.

So the consumer should have to pay for the "inconvenience" of a business offering a product for sale? Wow how much Kool-Aid have you drunk?

Well, the alternative is we could have all waited until August for Apple to manufacture and stockpile enough media for a traditional launch.

Personally, I have no problem with the few who won't be able to download having to wait for physical media to be prepared while I am typing on a Lion machine mere hours after it was released without leaving the house. That's progress indeed!

Sucks to be in the minority, but if you aren't going to have the means to download that's exactly what you are - and now Apple has a solution - wait for it if you have to.